Norman Kansfield, president of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, will deliver the 15th A.J. Muste Memorial Lecture at Hope College on Tuesday, April 4, at 3:30 p.m. in Room 102 of VanderWerf Hall.

The public is invited. Admission is free. The A.J. Muste Memorial Lecture began in 1985 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of A.J. Muste, a 1905 graduate of Hope College. Muste went on to become one of the most well-known and influential peace activists in the United States, working for many years as the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Kansfield has been president and John Henry Livingstone Professor of Theology at New Brunswick Theological Seminary since 1993. He is an especially appropriate Muste Lecturer, according to lecture coordinator Professor Donald Cronkite, since Muste attended New Brunswick Theological Seminary from 1906 to 1909. Kansfield's lecture is titled "'Church' and 'Gospel:' A.J. Muste's Legacy for Today's Crucial Conversations." He is especially interested in Muste's critique of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary that he attended at the beginning of the century and some of the inadequacies Muste found for preparing pastors for the world they would encounter. He will apply that critique to some of the critical conversations the church is encountering at the beginning of this new century. With degrees from Hope College, Western Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, Kansfield began his career as a pastor in New York and Illinois before becoming assistant librarian and then librarian at Beardslee Library at Western Theological Seminary from 1974 to 1983. He then was director of library services and associate professor of church history at Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozier Theological Seminary and St. Bernard's Institute before assuming the Presidency of New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1993. Following his graduation from New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1909, Muste was ordained a pastor in the Reformed Church in America. He served churches in New York until he found himself in opposition to World War I and resigned his pastorate in 1914. There followed a span of years in which Muste was a labor organizer and radical socialist educator until 1936, when he returned to the church after a religious experience in Paris. From then until his death in 1967, Muste worked in active opposition to war. This year's Muste Lecture is supported by the A.J. Muste Lectureship Fund, the Cultural Affairs Committee and the Office of the Provost.